Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race

A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature. In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages.Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean.In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world. Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race.The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.